Unreal Engine environment design

Oh boy. This has been a project and a half. A lot of big learning experiences, going all the way back to October. Let's go back in time and reflect.

Late september/early October, we start coming up with ideas for our project. Brainstorming, inspiration, determination, vision. I started by blocking out a very rough first idea inside Blender, while taking inspiration from other media and real life towns, I talk more in depth about this in my previous post about this project.

I started modelling 3D assets for the project, I personally looked at this as a game project, since I am looking to create games, or at least, just interactive experiences in the future, so I kept my models low poly, used game assets from the marketplace and Sketchfab, etc.

For my work in progress (WIP) renders I used Blender's eevee and Cycles renderers. Used this mainly as WIP showcases for my online portfolio page and Telegram channel.

(This render made using Cycles) Porting assets to Unreal Engine was an interesting experience as at first all the textures were one-sided and the normals seemed to be either inverted or shaded from the wrong side. Eventually I fixed this by making the materials two-sided and this seemed to fix it. The other problems I ran into were the landsape in Unreal randomly deciding to not have textures anymore. Just suddenly, random squares of the landscape would revert to the default gray "missing texture" texture, which meant I had to hide one of these squares at first, behind a thick forest, however, when one appeared right in the middle of my town, I could no longer just keep piling on make-up to hide it. My tutor and Unreal Engine wizard Henry helped me fix this by switching the properties of the texture maps inside the node editor which instantly mended the issue.

Rendering the video was another adventure, with some objects deciding they were physics objects and became affected by the default wind inside unreal, making them tumble across the land. I fixed this by converting them to a skeletal mesh which cemented them into place.

Editing together the final video was not a big issue, I am quite experienced with video editing. I also decided to use a song that is not a part of the public domain, but since this is a university project, I thought I might as well use a song that I myself enjoy, and after months of hard work, I thought I might as well treat myself that much and allow myself a good song for the final cinematic clip.

In conclusion, I think this was a very good effort by my entire team. we worked hard, many late nights, the process ended up being much harder and more time consuming than any of us could have initially thought, but it was all well worth it, after all, we are all here to learn. James, Dan and Orla put in unreasonable amounts of work into their building assets, I almost cannot believe how good they are, visually at the very least. Me and Michael both focused more on our environments and landscapes themselves, I suppose. I spent quite a lot of time creating the landscape, painting on the textures, painting the roads, paths, patches of grass, I also figured out how to make water using a plane and some free Marketplace water materials. I also spent a very long time using the foliage paint feature to paint on grass, some grain fields, trees and bushes, to add some greenery. Most western towns are set in arid areas, with deserts and dry landscapes. I wanted to something more green, something closer to the rocky mountains, maybe even more north near Montana or Idaho. So I populated my world with evergreen trees. I also added some ambient dust to certain areas, and some abandoned cars, and some broken things, like the town hall sign, or the broken native American totem, to give the feeling that perhaps everyone's left recently, in a hurry. In the end, I feel like I could have done better, if I had tinkered with the lighting more, actually built the lighting with a higher quality, as my laptop for some reason kept the preview watermark on even after switching it off in the show settings. But these are all things I am learning from now, remembering, so I can avoid mistakes in later projects, and use everything good I learned this semester, which is a lot. Thank you again for reading. I will write again very soon!